Twitter and The Voice Using Augmented Reality to Encourage Engagement

Twitter has seriously been working at increasing social engagement when it comes to television for a while now. It's whythey've picked up sports broadcasting recently, but now they're looking at a different form of TV. Rather than looking at broadcasting the shows themselves, they're encouraging fans of The Voice to tweet, hashtag and use stickers on both Vine and Twitter.

The Voice is a pretty big show, even if you don't always hear about the winners after the show has ended. Back in 2013, it was made possible that users on Twitter could tweet to save singers from getting voted off. This is much bigger than that and should hopefully appeal to the show's younger fans. Twitter set up an AR booth backstage where the judges and contestants could record six-second vines where they interact with inanimate objects. Using these objects would bring up the 3D hashtags and stickers within the videos. The inanimate objects were essentially little paddles that had the image of what would pop up on it. Some of the paddles would remain the same for each judge, but others would change.

This AR booth mostly works due to pre-built fanbases. The judges all bring in their own fans from their music careers and some of the contestants may have fans from their other work too. The Voice was already pretty successful on Twitter for these exact reasons and will continue to be in the future. The Voice actually has 4.2 million followers and the coaches bring in another 48 million followers who can see the content. This all adds up to a lot of interested users and many of those will have used the hashtags that featured the little emojis of each of the judges.

Of course, The Voice has spawned international versions all across the world so what would be more interesting would be if they were to bring these things in for the international versions as well. The AR booth was just there for the one show as far as we know, but the emojis will stick around for users to share their support for their preferred team.

The episode aired and the vines were posted on Monday 9th of May and they will still be there for users and fans to share now.